Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

The Current Server is the server you’re using right now to read this post. All that data is being moved to the Legacy Server, which despite the name is actually another new server I’ve set up. It’s a little less powerful than the Current Server, but it has SSD hard drives and modern software, which should make a difference.

As with all things, the reason for the change is price. We’re paying about $189 US per month for the Current Server, and it’s replacement the Legacy Server costs ~$16 ~$27. For reference, the Linode servers cost about $10 each.

Theoretically it should be faster for those of you in the EU, and about 40-60 ms more latent for those of us in North America. That said, thanks to the SSD, responses should be quicker in general, so you may not even notice.

Eventually, the Legacy Server will truly be the Legacy Server. We’ll have moved all Ludum Dare operations to the New Server(s), and it will be kept around to reference data we don’t migrate over (comments, spammer user accounts, etc). The Theme Selection process is handled entirely on the New Servers (using a crazy workaround to authenticate using your Legacy Ludum Dare account).

EDIT: Ah, as is always the case, I found I needed a bit more oomph. I’ve decided instead to bump this up to a stronger server. Monthly cost is now ~$27, not ~$16. 😉

EDIT 2: I did some I/O benchmarking. The replacement server has roughly 3x faster writes, and 5x faster reads from disk. The new server is slower when it comes to raw CPU performance (Intel Xeon vs. Atom), but my same benchmark still reported a whopping 80% of the performance of the Current Server for files cached in RAM. The faster disk I/O combined with 2 extra CPU cores, nearly 3x the RAM (32 GB vs 12 GB), and again “modern software”, I think it’ll do just fine. I’m fairly confident this is going to be okay.

EDIT 4: Oh, and software wise, the Current Server (i.e. old) runs Apache, MySQL, and PHP 5.6 (with OpCache). The replacement Legacy Server runs OpenLiteSpeed, MariaDB, and PHP 7 (with OpCache). i.e. The same software I’ve been running on the New Server(s). Remember this is old data, so our databases were actually in MyISAM format previously, now InnoDB (or whatever MariaDB’s variant wants to call itself). This doubled the database disk usage (2 GB to 4 GB), but we have 32 GB of RAM now. We can fit the whole thing (and then some) in RAM. 😀

So on paper the Current Server should have been faster (6 core Xeon vs. 8 core Atom), but an excess of RAM, the speed of SSDs, and me actually knowing how to set up this stuff now, yeah, it’s faster.

I’m hoping tonight to be able to finally hit the switch, and permanently change ludumdare.com to point to this replacement server.

EDIT 5: I was able to hack together a dummy WordPress plugin to fix the DKIM email issues. A bit more work left on the e-mail server (TLS support, DMARC?), some more general server hardening, and get off-site backups working. This Monday seems to have been eaten up by other distractions, so I’m shooting for Tuesday to flip the switch.

EDIT 6: Okay, e-mail stuff appears to be good now. TLS and DMARC are working. Our web server software was just updated today (Thursday), so I want to test and see if that works before we go live (there was a bug in the previous version, so we had to run an older version).

EDIT 7: Hello! Welcome to the new server. I’m still doing some final configurations and testing, but hey, you made it!

EDIT 8: Okay, I think all the issues people were having since the move are fixed. On my end I need to get backups working again, as well as a few minor e-mail issues resolved (mainly affecting me). But hey, we’re almost ready to shut-down the old server.

This entry was posted
on Friday, March 18th, 2016 at 11:30 am and is filed under LD #35.
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Created an account this morning to participate in my first LD. Made my first “I’m in” post and submitted it for review and it hasn’t been approved yet. Not sure if you’ve just not gotten to it yet or if this is a bug.

Yeah sorry, I can be a little slow on approving posts. I usually switch the site to automatically make everyone that signs up an author, but I forgot to do this (and if I don’t hit the switch before you make your account, it doesn’t work).

My author page doesn’t show anything (http://ludumdare.com/compo/author/docjekyll/) but I can see author pages for other people.
Do I need to have made a “post” before? I have made 3 games for LD but never made a blog post.

When I click “+New POST”, it asks me to log in WordPress, even though I’m already logged in the LD website, and I ticked “Remember Me” the last several times. More than that, I logged in and wrote a post, and when I clicked “Submit”, it asked me to log in again.

I don’t know if the problem was existant with the old server, but an imported gif won’t display correctly in a post. Instead, it show a deformed version of one frame (i’m guessing the first one) and doesn’t animate. My guess is that it’s related to WordPress directly but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Not sure if this is the server or the site, but I rated and commented on a game, it let me without error, but since it was a few hours since my last activity my login cookie must have expired, and my rate and comment did not save.